Management in the Age of Mechanical Observation

AI can make the work visible. It cannot make it official.

A junior analyst spends an afternoon describing to an AI the tool she has wanted for a year. By the evening it works. By Friday she has changed the process it was built to support.

Her manager had that tool on next quarter’s roadmap. He hears about it on Monday, from a summary his director forwarded to him. He asks to be kept in the loop. Could the team set up a weekly update, and find some time to align?

The work is not hidden; anyone can open it. The request says a great deal about what he would like to receive, and nothing about what he would bring.

A monochrome collage of an impossible endless staircase. Managers in suits sit at a meeting table on the landing that looks highest, others climb with briefcases, and workers at a drafting board and a workbench stand on another landing of the same loop. — Upstairs The problem is not that management is upstairs, but that it still believes there is an upstairs.

I. The bargain

In 1903 Frederick Winslow Taylor wrote: “All possible brain work should be removed from the shop and centred in the planning or laying-out department.” For a century, that was the bargain. Managers did the thinking and had the say over how the work was done. Workers carried it out. Taylor, 1903

AI can push the other way. The analyst designed the tool and built it in the same afternoon. Wherever people are allowed to work like this, the planning and the imagining are drifting back to the people who do the work, and with them the say over how it is done. And the work itself is now visible to everyone, including the manager’s boss.

II. The ritual

A status update has always done two jobs. It carried information upward, and it acknowledged who reports to whom. David Graeber called such meetings “the high rituals of the corporate world.” (Graeber, Bullshit Jobs, 2018)

Now the information is a link anyone can open. Only the acknowledgment is left. That is why the request to be kept in the loop can arrive with no offer to contribute.

This is not vanity. Managers were trained and promoted inside this arrangement, and being informed was how they learned that they mattered. Losing it is a real loss, and it deserves to be named.

III. What is left

Slavoj Žižek noticed that knowing something is not the same as it being official: “it is not enough for all concerned individuals to know some fact; ‘it,’ the symbolic institution, must also know/‘register’ this fact.” Žižek, 1997

Every office has a project that everyone knows is dead and that is still on the roadmap. AI has made the work visible. It has not made it official. Someone still has to decide that this is now the plan, that the other project stops, that the risk is accepted, and that the work counted. Then they have to own it.

That is most of what good management always was, buried under the work of carrying information around. Mark Fisher defended “management as opposed to managerialism.” Managerialism asks to be informed. Management makes things official. Fisher, 2011

IV. Step one

Before asking to be kept in the loop, work out what you would add to it. Look at the work first; it is there. Then arrive with a decision rather than a request.

Our own tools can automate the status ritual instead of retiring it: a weekly AI summary for every manager, read by nobody. The difference is not the tool. It is whether anyone decides anything with it.

Nobody is coming for your job. The work has simply stopped waiting for you.

Original editorial illustration generated with AI for this essay.